The Romance vs. The Reality

Romance: You imagine telling an all-capable AI, “Build me a team of little helpers. Make one plan, another research, a third draft, a fourth deploy. They’ll self-organize, self-heal, and I’ll sip tea like a chilled CEO.”

Reality: You spend an afternoon deciding whether a trigger should be a cron, a webhook, or a polite nudge in a shared folder. You discover that “tool configuration” is a gentle way of saying “you will become the neighborhood’s leading expert in API rate limits.” You learn that JSON is not a vibe; it’s an accountability partner.

Do I love it? Honestly—yes. Because every time I get one small piece right, the next piece clicks faster. The parade gets steadier. The grin gets a little more real.

Why It Feels Slow (and Why That’s Good)

The mechanics: what buttons exist and what they do.
The mental model: how to think about the whole thing so it doesn’t fall over in a light breeze.

The mechanics are well-documented anywhere; the mental model is earned. You earn it by messing up politely, keeping logs, and making artifacts other agents can use without guessing.

The slowness is the earning. It’s the part where you discover that a “smart” agent is only as smart as the boundaries you give it, the tools you connect, and the exits you label in red.

My Working Model: The Brass-Key Parade

Agent-0 is the floor manager with a brass key. Its job isn’t to write or research; it’s to enable the specialists and keep them from stepping on each other.
Planner asks the annoying, saving questions: What’s the goal? Who’s it for? What’s “done”? What is explicitly not in scope?
Researcher returns quotations and links—not vibes. If it can’t show the paragraph it learned from, it’s just brainstorming with better lighting.
Writer & Editor turn notes into readable artifacts. Not promises. Files.
Deployer ships things where humans actually live—blogs, docs, social—then verifies it’s truly there.
Orchestrator is the crossing guard. It listens for events, paces the work, and prints shift notes I can read with one eye at 7 a.m.

That’s the parade. Each one carries a tiny sign. Each one does one job. Together, they get me from “idea” to “live” without turning my calendar into a bonfire.

The First Wall I Hit: Tooling Gravity

You know that shoebox on the curb labeled APIs / Tools / Webhooks? That’s where the magic really is—and it’s where the hours go missing. The agent framework gives you a brain; the tools give it hands.

Hands need gloves. Gloves need sizes. Sizes need labels.

File watchers? Great—until they trigger because an app writes a hidden thumbnail.
Email? Lovely—until you learn about send quotas after your digest quietly stops digesting.
CMS? Fantastic—until you forget to verify after publish and spend ten minutes wondering why “success” isn’t visible.

This is the complicated part. It’s also the part that makes the system yours. Ten small integrations beat one enormous “general intelligence” every day of the week ending in “y.”

Note to self: when something works once, write down why. Your future self deserves a map, not a treasure hunt.

Mistakes I Now Make on Purpose

Dry-run by default. Deployer generates diffs first. I click “yes.” We both sleep better.
Artifacts over chat logs. Every handoff is a file (Markdown, JSON, CSV). Bots don’t guess; they read.
Two-paragraph shift notes. After each run, the system writes: what started, what finished, what failed, and where I’d look first. It’s boring. It’s also magic.
Red-stamp constraints. Scope changes, rate limits, “do not send” dates. If it’s important, it’s literally marked in red in the config. Future me thanks Past me like a good neighbor who labels leftovers.

The Part That Still Feels Like Art

Deciding that three sources are enough for a post, but they must be quoted and linked.
Choosing one headline and one angle, then letting everything else die on a sticky note with dignity.
Knowing when a draft is “alive enough” to ship and when it needs a human to move the last paragraph to the top.

Taste can’t be automated, but it can be supported. I keep a tiny brand bible—voice, words I like, words I avoid, a few exemplar pieces. The agents use that as a compass. I decide where north is.

The Cat and the Key

In my head—and on a certain cartoon—the shop supervisor is a chunky tuxedo cat with a collar tag that says Deep Dive AI. He bats a spare wind-up key around the floor, watching me label things in red and mutter in YAML.

I swear he understands the process better than I do.

He’s my reminder that fun matters. That this is play with consequences. That if I’m not smiling at least once per loop, I’m doing it wrong. Also that snacks solve more problems than meetings.

What I’ve Actually Built (So Far)

A research loop that returns quotes + links into sources.json and an annotated notes.md.
A draft loop that uses the notes to produce a structured article with headings and a sources block.
A deploy loop that renders HTML, inserts alt text, appends citations, and posts to my blog—then GETs the live page to confirm.
A tiny orchestrator that watches notes.md and draft.md, throttles calls when other jobs are running, and writes a one-pager shift note.

It’s not a spaceship. It’s a parade. But it’s my parade, and it works more mornings than not.

Why Self-Teaching Is Worth It

It’s slower. You’ll reread the same docs three times. You’ll build something, forget why it worked, and rebuild it more cleanly. You will absolutely hate the phrase “idempotency key” for 48 hours.

And then a switch flips. You stop wrestling, start composing, and suddenly your tools feel like choreography instead of chores. You’ve earned the mental model. Now you get to make things.

Also: no one else knows your mess like you do. Self-teaching lets you design around your realities—your content pipeline, your creative rhythms, your cat’s need to stand on the keyboard during deploys.

The Boring Practices That Keep It Fun

Small PRs, even for yourself. One improvement per loop. Merges stay friendly.
Post-publish checks. Links, images, embeds—verify as a ritual, not a vibe.
Versioned prompts. When you tweak a prompt, save it with a note. Your future sanity depends on remembering why “v3b” exists.
Rollback rehearsals. Practice undoing a publish when nothing’s on fire. Muscle memory matters.
Graceful degradation. If a service is down, the parade slows; it doesn’t crash. A “we’ll try again later” is a valid victory.

What I Wish I’d Known on Day One

Start comically small. One input, one output, one dry-run, one deploy. Add music later.
Plan in public. Your plan.md is the boss. If a task isn’t on it, it’s not real yet.
Budget tokens like money. Because they are. Write actual numbers in the config.
Write for future you. Logs, comments, and shift notes are love letters to the person who has to debug at 6 a.m.
Celebrate tiny wins. “The citations attached correctly” deserves a fist-pump. There are no small victories; just compounding ones.

A 30-Minute Starter Parade (If You’re Where I Was)

Make a folder with input/, artifacts/, logs/, publish/.
Write a six-line plan with goal, audience, deliverable, source count, and a “done when” sentence.
Pull three quotes with links into notes.md.
Draft 400 words from those quotes into draft.md.
Dry-run a deploy that renders HTML but doesn’t publish.
Write a shift note titled: “What I expected vs. what the machine did.”

That’s your brass key. Twist it once. You’re officially in the parade.

On Patience (and Promos)

If you’ve followed my work, you know I bounce between deep dives and satirical ink, serious reflections and goofy cat cameos. Learning this new agent world inherits all of that energy—and all of the patience. Progress is lumpy. Confidence arrives in little envelopes. The complicated parts are not punishment; they’re scaffolding.

For related reads, see:

And if you enjoy the aesthetic (and the feline QA department), we’ve got fresh merch rotating through the window. For a limited time, code DEEPDIVE10OFF takes 10% off at the shop. It keeps the lights on and the brass keys shiny.

Helpful Desk Gear

Disclosure: Some links may be affiliate links; if you choose to buy, it helps the channel at no extra cost.

Final Shift Note

What did I learn today?

Teaching yourself a new product is less about finding hidden features and more about inventing responsible habits.
Agents are easier to love when they’re smaller, named, and held to simple contracts.
The things that feel “slow and complicated” at first become muscle memory—a choreography you can dance while sipping coffee and shooing a cat off the keyboard.

Tomorrow the parade will be a little smoother. The logs will be clearer. The grin will look less like “please don’t catch fire” and more like “I know where the extinguisher is, and I labeled it in red.”

What could possibly go wrong? Everything. But a little less each day.

Search This Blog

About the Author